# SABET-QA: Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20083/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00782/) (2018)
- [Tensor Decompositions for temporal knowledge base completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04926/) (2020)
- [UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00959/) (2022)
- [Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01515/) (2021)
- [Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08935/) (2021)
- [Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08236/) (2022)
- [Temporal Knowledge Base Completion: New Algorithms and Evaluation Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05035/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Temporal Knowledge Graph: Representation Learning and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04782/) (2024)
- [TempoQR: Temporal Question Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05785/) (2021)
- [Temporal Knowledge Question Answering via Abstract Reasoning Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09149/) (2023)
- [Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15400/) (2024)
- [Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14191/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) requires reasoning over time-sensitive facts, yet existing embedding-based methods struggle with multi-step queries due to single-pass reasoning pipelines. We propose SABET-QA, a framework that iteratively refines reasoning states across multiple hops via a bidirectional entity-temporal scoring mechanism and a slot-aware contextualization module that aligns question semantics with temporal KG embeddings. A differentiable working memory enables progressive hypothesis refinement, while auxiliary temporal boundaries serve as coarse supervision when available. Experiments on CronQuestions, Complex-CronQuestions, MultiTQ, and TimeQuestions demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly on complex multi-step temporal queries.